6 October 2025

Mammalwatching Turns 20

Twenty years ago this week I was reluctantly packing up my life in Australia to move to France. Desperate for a distraction I decided to build a website to share what I had learned during 7 years chasing Australia’s mammals.

Back in 2005 I believed I was one of only two serious mammalwatchers on the planet (Rohan Clarke in Australia was the other). This exclusivity was one of life’s great mysteries. I suspected a popular misconception about how hard it was to find mammals was partly to blame. As was the lack of information about where and how to search for them. When I was planning a trip back then the best intel I could hope for was a brief list of mammals at the end of a  some birding trip reports or what I could discover from harassing researchers. I was envious of all the resources Australian birders had at their disposal and hoped mammalwatching.com could redress the balance.

Twenty years – and 1760 lifers – later how things have changed! There is a thriving global mammalwatching community: several thousand people subscribe to Katy’s newsletters and many more have joined regional mammalwatching groups on Facebook. Mammalwatching.com had almost 70,000 unique visitors in August alone.

It is much easier now to watch mammals, with a treasure trove of information on where and how to find many species that I once thought I would never see in the wild. From Snow Leopards to Spectacled Bears, from Pandas to Pangolins, there are now dozens of mammals that just 20 years ago were widely thought of as ‘impossible’ to see but which are now pretty much guaranteed in the right area.

I have long had a theory that there is a reliable place to see just about every mammal species, even if we don’t know where those places are yet for many species. And the evidence for this theory gets stronger ever year. A few days ago I may have found a reliable place to see Sunda Pangolin on Java (report coming soon).

Meanwhile dozens of tour companies, guides, lodges, even whole communities – like Klalik village in West Papua – have seen their lives transformed by mammalwatching ecotourism, sometimes from just one trip report. This is great for conservation. At the risk of stating the obvious, once a species has value to a local community it can go from persecuted to protected.

I’m excited to see what the next twenty years will bring.

This community has no shortage of ideas on ways to grow interest in mammalwatching and to scale up the benefits that it is already bringing to global conservation and to scientific research. But there is a shortage of time and money to turn those ideas into action. Mammalwatching Inc. is now a registered charity in the USA and we will be trying to raise funds to help bring these ideas to fruition. More on this soon. Though if you know any philanthropists who might be interested in supporting this work then I would be very very happy to hear from you. In the meantime, you can always buy me – or rather the website – a birthday coffee or two: https://buymeacoffee.com/mammalwatching

Most importantly I wanted to thank all of you who have supported the website and this community over the past 20 years. Thank you to the companies that advertise and to each and every mammalwatcher who has taken the time to write trip reports, offer advice, join trips or simply make a supportive comment now and again. We may still be vastly outnumbered by birders and herpers, but what we lack in population we make up for in our sense of adventure, enthusiasm and friendliness. We are also – obviously – much cooler and better looking.

Together we have become a powerful force for conservation.

Happy twentieth birthday to us!

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Jon Hall
Genetically Welsh, spiritually Australian, currently in New York City. I’ve also lived and worked in London, Canberra, Paris and Lusaka, and watched mammals in over 100 countries.
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